TV View: Gary Neville becomes a Dragon for a day - but did he get burned?

It’s 19 years since Dragons’ Den started up on the BBC, and in all that time they’ve never once had a guest investor. Until Thursday night, that is, when, of all people, Gary Neville took a seat in the Den alongside the regular crew of Peter Jones, Deborah Meaden, Touker Suleyman, Sara Davies and Steven Bartlett.

Say what you like about Gary, but that was brave, him risking making as dodgy an investment as, say, Manchester United paying €95 million for Antony, thereby ensuring that Jamie Carragher would tweet “ha, ha, ha” at him forever and a day if either business went belly-up.

And he was exceedingly brave, ending up investing in two of the four business ideas pitched to the entrepreneurs, one a string of pods, which Peter said looked like “boarded up skips”, where people watch movies on 93-inch tellies from king-size beds, the other a cacao company run by a fella who looks like the son of Motorhead’s Lemmy and who sings to his cacao when it arrives in Manchester from Venezuela to give it “a heightened vibration”.

He actually made offers to three of the pitchers, among them Giselle from Sheffield whose business centres on needle-less ear acupuncture. Gary told her that he is surrounded by powerful women in his life and that her back story and presentation were so impressive, his mum, sister, wife and daughters would never forgive him if he didn’t invest. In that sense, he is the anti-Joey Barton. But Giselle rejected his offer, opting for Steven instead, leaving Gary gutted.

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Mind you, not half as gutted as Billy from Essex who sells football memorabilia and was confident Gary would jump at the chance of pouring money in to his business because he too was once a player, having a brief spell in Tranmere’s reserves before retiring at the age of 22.

This made the Beeb’s billing of him as a former professional footballer, while technically true, a little like the use of “ex-Premier League ace” in headlines about a lad who was fifth-choice left-back for Blackpool in 2010. There we were thinking Marcel Desailly was about to enter the Den selling thermal socks.

Anyway, Gary declined to invest in Billy’s venture, possibly having heard him say that “hopefully his interest in my business is better than some of his punditry”.

And while there’s a risk in taking a punt on a business, there can be as big a one for turning one down. Like when Deborah dismissed a fella’s implement for unknotting hair back in 2007 – “it’s like a horse brush!” – only for him to sell his Tangle Teezer for £70 million. A little like Manchester United opting not to sign Erling Haaland from Molde for the price of Antony’s left ear lobe. Hopefully Gary won’t come to rue rejecting Billy’s memorabilia business in a similar fashion.

But at least Sian and John from Cardiff accepted his offer for a share in their Cosy Cinema pod business, although he had to share with Touker, who is kind of the Den’s Harry Redknapp. That’s not to say that’s a bad thing, but Gary would strike you as a man of little patience, and he’ll need tons of it working with Touker.

Last up was Liam from Manchester who told the Dragons that he had been inspired to start his business when he “stumbled upon the cacao shaman in Guatemala back in 2012″. And which one of us hasn’t? He was accompanied in to the Den by cacao goddess Paulina and engaged the Dragons in call-and-response type chanting while he beat a bodhrán-like instrument. By now, Gary was missing Carragher.

“Cacao is a cup of love, abundance and joy, it’s like floating on a cloud and being given a beautiful cuddle at the same time,” he told them. “You live in a very different space,” said Deborah, as politely as she could. “I live in a council house in Withington, so probably yeah,” he chuckled.

Gary fell in love with Liam. And it was hard not to. “What football team do you support?” he asked. “Manchester City,” said Liam, pointing at a tattoo. “You destroyed my childhood.”

But no hard feelings, Liam accepting Gary’s suggestion that he, Peter and Steven all invest in his cacao business. Liam was chuffed. Except: “My brother’s going to absolutely kill me, he hates Gary Neville.” Hopefully, though, Liam’s cacao business will turn out to be another Tangle Teezer. And not an Antony.